econd of an five-part series

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. – When most fans think of Penn State sports, football and other men's teams come to mind. But it's the women who rule.

Last year, the volleyball team won the national championship, and the basketball and soccer teams advanced to the national semifinals.

Penn State is considered a model for women's sports. More than 350 athletes compete in 14 women's varsity sports there. Scholarships are worth a total of $2.2 million. The operating budget tops $6 million – less than half of what Penn State spends on men's sports, but a sharp increase from the past.

About the only thing the Penn State women consistently lose is money – $3.3 million last year.

That's not unusual. Very few women's teams make money, even in the highest-profile women's sport – basketball. An Inquirer survey of the top 100 women's basketball programs in the nation showed that they lost a total of $65 million in 1999. Men's basketball at the same schools made $150 million.

The major exception in women's basketball was national champion Connecticut, which plays before packed crowds in Gampel Pavilion and has a television contract – a rarity among women's programs. It made $1 million in fiscal year 1999.

Most women's teams are funded by a combination of sources, ranging from football revenues to special state appropriations to endowments to general revenues and student activity fees.

A good deal of the $146 million in profits that football has generated for the University of Florida in the last decade has gone to build one of the most successful women's sports programs in the nation. Last year, the school's budget for women's athletics topped $13 million, up nearly $2.9 million from two years earlier.

In 1979, the Florida Legislature earmarked nearly $500,000 a year for women's sports at the university. It also allowed the school to keep the sales tax from ticket sales – worth $694,511 last year. Finally, the university directed $1.4 million in student fees toward women's sports.

"We take women's sports seriously here – probably above and beyond what you see at other schools," said Ann Marie Rogers, the school's senior women's athletic director.

Rogers bristles at the idea that women's sports are somehow bankrupting men's sports – the refrain of some athletic directors. The number of male athletes in some sports has declined since the advent of Title IX, the landmark 1972 federal legislation that required equal opportunities and spending for women's sports. But the number of men competing still outnumbers women. And spending on men's teams dwarfs spending on women's teams by two to three times at big schools. Absolute spending on men's teams, especially football, is increasing faster than on women's teams.

"They have been blaming women for cutting men's sports for a long time," Rogers said. "Certainly, universities have budget problems. But I think there are some men's sports that have been cut where they could have spread the wealth around a little better.

"You have a situation where schools want to have football because they want to have football. Then they go into debt. I think the women get blamed."